Council staff have been overpaid more than £1.6 million – despite the rolling out of a multi-million-pound HR and payroll system introduced to help tackle chronic salary errors.
Secretive City of Edinburgh Council bosses have refused to reveal the true cost of the controversial Oracle project – which went live in October 2024 – however budget documents suggest the system costs in the region of £1.45 million a year to run.
Figures obtained by The Edinburgh Reporter show that as of December 2025 the council was owed £1,629,270 in salary overpayments made over a five year period.
In the 15 months since Oracle – known internally as MyHR – was introduced, 365 overpayments totalling £651,000 have been made, with some individual staff receiving overpayments exceeding £8,000.
During the same period 755 staff were underpaid a total of £752,000, with the vast majority requiring emergency payments to their bank accounts to be able to meet household bills.
The council has also admitted writing off £139,000 in April 2025 because it had lost track of overpayments to 27 employees and were unable to recover the money. This was part of a £349,000 write-off relating to historic salary overpayments – typically more than five years old – which were deemed no longer viable to recover.
A council source said: “It was claimed that this new system was going to mitigate overpayment issues but since the introduction of MyHR the council have continued to overpay employees at a phenomenal rate.
“This system was supposed to reduce the manual process and to allow all staff to submit claims online – reducing the overpayment burden – but they can’t get it to work and it is still a manual process for up to 2,500 staff.”
The £1,629,270 owed to the council as at December 2025 has decreased by a paltry £8,000 since September 2024, when The Edinburgh Reporter revealed £1,637,324 was outstanding.
The then Council Leader, Cammy Day, boasted that improvements were coming, stating: “We’ve specifically brought measures in place to help us strengthen procedures and reduce overpayments, including detailed monitoring and increased training. This will be reinforced by the roll out of our new HR/Payroll system in October.”
The Council have previously rejected attempts to discover the cost of implementing and running Oracle but its outsourced Information and Communications Technology agreement is said to cost in the region of £26 million a year and runs until March 2029. The Oracle upgrade, approved in March 2023, is understood to cost £1.45 million a year.
Finance and Resources Convener, Mandy Watt, said: “Our payroll salary and wage payments are around £550m annually, for a workforce of over 17,000 colleagues, and on average 99.8% of monthly payments are accurate.
“The new HR and Payroll system gives colleagues improved visibility of the information that’s used to calculate their pay, and they can view their payslip electronically each month allowing earlier discussion of any potential issues.
“Since it was implemented, we’ve seen a 55% reduction in overpayments as we continue to improve our payroll accuracy.”
